Rudolf Arrnheim Collegiate Professor of German Studies and Film, Television, & Media
moltke@umich.eduOffice Information:
https://umich.zoom.us/my/moltke
6330 North Quad
phone: 734-764-8018
hours: W 2-3pm and by appointment. For appointments, please contact Lana Naqshbandi (lanana@umich.edu)
Department of Film, Television, and Media; Graduate Program
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Literature, Duke University, 1998B.A., Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, 1989
Newest from von Moltke
Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, 1944-45 Freya and Helmuth von Moltke
edited by Helmuth Caspar von Moltke, Dorothea von Moltke, and Johannes von Moltke
Tegel prison, Berlin, in the fall of 1944. Helmuth James von Moltke is awaiting trial for his leading role in the Kreisau Circle, one of the most important German resistance groups against the Nazis. By a near miracle, the prison chaplain at Tegel is Harald Poelchau, a friend and coconspirator of Helmuth and his wife, Freya. From Helmuth’s arrival at Tegel in late September 1944 until the day of his execution by the Nazis on January 23, 1945, Poelchau would carry Helmuth’s and Freya’s letters in and out of prison daily, risking his own life. Freya would safeguard these letters for the rest of...
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The Curious Humanist (2016)
Johannes von Moltke
During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is now considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film. Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and political context shaped Kracauer’s seminal contributions to film studies and shows...
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Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer (2012)
Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke, eds.
Culture in the Anteroom introduces an English-speaking readership to the full range of Siegfried Kracauer's work as novelist, architect, journalist, sociologist, historian, exile critic, and theorist of visual culture. This interdisciplinary anthology—including pieces from Miriam Bratu Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, Noah Isenberg, Lutz Koepnick, Eric Rentschler, and Heide Schlüpmann—brings together literary and film scholars, historians and art historians, sociologists, and architects to address the scope and current relevance of a body of work dedicated to investigating ...
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No Place Like Home: Locations of the Heimat in German Cinema (2005)
Johannes von Moltke
This is the first comprehensive account of Germany's most enduring film genre, the Heimatfilm, which has offered idyllic variations on the idea that "there is no place like home" since cinema's early days. Charting the development of this popular genre over the course of a century in a work informed by film studies, cultural history, and social theory, Johannes von Moltke focuses in particular on its heyday in the 1950s, a period that has been little studied. Questions of what it could possibly mean to call the German nation "home" after the catastrophes of World War II are...
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